Archive for the ‘free games i like’ tag

I rather liked the little blog competition we had recently, so I thought we’d have another one. This time though, I wanted something really difficult to vex you all with – not just the ‘see who can get the lowest stat’ like we did last time. No, I wanted something difficult.

But even I think Chase Goose might be a bit extreme. It isn’t so much a game as it is a tool for murdering your keyboard. If you’re any good at it then it’ll leave your brain looking like leftover Chow Mein and your fingers like crumpled slivers of wet soap. Or maybe that’s just me, as I’m admittedly a bit crap at it.

Am I late in discovering Minecraft? Judging by the fact that development started in 2009 and that Minecraft has over 23000 registered players, I’m willing to bet that I am late in discovering it. Doesn’t matter. It’s still awesome.

Minecraft isn’t technically a free game – it’s a free playable alpha of an indie game that’s still in production. It’s playable online, in a browser, in both singleplayer and multiplayer formats.

Best described as a minimalist, retro sandbox, there’s no real aim to Minecraft, at the moment anyway. All you do is run around a world carved out of rudimentary, regularly sized blocks, fending off critters and bashing holes in things or piling up blocks. It’s the bashing and piling which forms the focus of the game.

Getting people to work together is difficult. Getting people who don't know each other to work together is very difficult. Getting people who don't know each other to work together over the internet is nearly impossible. Enter Transformice.

Transformice is elegantly simple in its premise. A number of mice, usually 25, have to get some cheese and take it to their hole. In their way are a number of obstacles, gaps, pits, bombs and, unfortunately, each other. Every mouse is controlled by a player, and one player gets to be the shaman, who can conjure various bits of apparatus to help the mice in their quest.

The game strikes a fine balance between teamwork and competition - the mice get more points the faster they get the cheese to their hole but they often need to wait for their shaman to construct them a path. The points are important as whoever has the most points at the end of a round becomes the shaman for the next round.

I’m a firm believer that it’s better to do something simple very well than it is to fumble something more complicated. So, it’s no surprise that I like indie platformer Orton and the Princess – it’s uncomplicated and polished to perfection. You are the beige square. The eponymous Princess is the pink square. You have to get to the pink square. Then the next level begins.

Gameplay-wise, Orton and the Princess isn’t any different to dozens of other platform games. Avoid the spikes, dodge the traps, reach the end of the level, set a high score. It does a few things though which help to set it apart – little things, like having an incredibly energetic banjo theme tune. Ding-ding-ding,duh-dong-ding!

You can do a lot with the written word and I find it endlessly interesting that even the most beautiful and graphically demanding games are often judged on the quality of the script. GTA IV was praised for its serious story before anyone remarked on how big the world was, while Crysis is often slammed for the way the experience is wounded by awful dialogue.

With that in mind, please don’t be put off that my latest favourite freebie is a text-only adventure, because if you dismiss it out of hand then you’d be missing out on a great little title. A word can make a thousand pictures and all that.

Essentially a multiple choice adventure, Choice of Broadsides casts you as a young officer in the navy of Albion, a fictional country which is basically a stand-in for England. At the start of the game you’re but a junior shipmate, but through your actions you get the chance to woo eligible ladies, orchestrate naval battles, deal with mutinies and do all the other stuff that an 18th Century naval officer would do.

Stranded 2 is a member of one of the rarest genres in the entire games industry - and it’s not a bad entry into it either. It’s a survival game. Not one in the sense of fending off waves of enemies, but in terms of man versus the environment. It puts you on a desert island and sees how long you can survive.

There are other survival games which are better known, such as Deus and the Lost in Blue series, but the genre is still horribly undernourished for those of us that actually like the idea of being stuck away from civilisation for an extended period. It gets even worse when you realise that Robinson’s Requiem is near unplayable and that the Lost in Blue games always decay into block-puzzles half-way through.

There are very few games which explicitly try to tackle the topic of romance because, as has been proved again and again by the games industry, it’s far easier to destroy something than it is to create something. It’s far easier to make a game about blowing up a car than building a marriage.

Air Pressure however has struck upon the idea of combining the two; it’s a game about destroying a relationship.

So, as the game starts, you are cast as a young man who is thinking about leaving his girlfriend of many years and, as the game unfolds through a simple multiple choice structure that’s borrowed from Japanese visual novels, you decide how you want the romance to end. Nice and amicably? Guiltily? You can even push it as far as attempted suicide, if you want.

For a long time there’s been talk among the more ambitious and feather-brained developers and players of games about a hypothetical artistic pinnacle of gaming – "the Citizen Kane of videogames". From the title of War and Peace you might expect this game attempts to reach that aim, perhaps by attempting to adapt the infamous Russian novel into game form.

But you’d be wrong, because War and Peace doesn’t have anything in common with Tolstoy’s colossal opus. Instead, it’s a de-make of perhaps the most-loved PC game of all time and the one title which could definitely hope to rival Tolstoy’s novel in depth. Well, if you’re feeling a bit hyperbolic anyway.

War and Peace is best explained as Civilization with only one button – a toggle which flips you between conflict and compromise.

The Wastes is a mod for the original Half-Life that struggled for a long time to stand out amongst the hundreds of other HL mods, but which never really managed to gather the sizable audience that multiplayer mods really need. Half-Life’s mod scene was just so big that The Wastes got lost in the shuffle.

That's not surprising because when it comes to the concept there isn’t really much that makes The Wastes stand out. It was a straight up deathmatch game with a post-apocalypse setting that mixed scavenged firearms with home-made weapons. Spears and sniper rifles, basically. What I really liked about it though was simply that the level design and balance made it great for playing in small groups, which is exactly how I chose to play it - 1v1.

The Wastes became a tradition for me in the weeks when I was home from university and every night I’d start it up and play a few quick LAN games with members of my family. We had two ailing, ancient PCs back then, plus my own slightly better machine, so when I made the out-of-the-blue suggestion of playing deathmatch with my non-gaming family then Half-Life was an obvious choice. It didn’t require much in terms of hardware, but the basics of the game were easy to pick up – and the mod community meant I had a way to customise it. I chose The Wastes at random, accidentally falling upon a game that would keep me entertained on and off for about three years.

I've always loved zombies and I’ve got piles of comics and books and games about them at home. The fascination probably comes from the fact that an apocalypse filled with slow-moving already dead things is likely the only type of survival situation I’d stand a chance in, though there are forum members who might disagree with me.

And as zombie games go, They Hunger is one of the best. Well, to start with anyway; the series was spread over three separate mods and, as time went on, they got increasingly ambitious.